Free Mary, Queen of Scots by Alison Weir

soldier of the guard, whose name he did not know. Powrie was Bothwell’s porter, Dalgleish his tailor, and while both were enlisted by the Earl to help the conspirators, neither had much inside knowledge of the plot.
    Around the same time, according to Hepburn, a servant of John Hay collected a large barrel that Hay had ordered from a merchant at the top of Sandy Bruce’s Close 10 and took it to Holyrood. It has been estimated that the barrel was the size of a 54-gallon cask, 11 much larger than a normal, full-size powder barrel, which held 100 pounds and had a diameter of 17 inches, and transporting it through the streets would have been impossible without assistance, but we are not told that Hay’s servant had a helper, or a horse.
    According to John Hay, from about 4 p.m. until dusk, Bothwell, Hay and Hepburn had been holding a meeting in the room where the powder was being stored. As soon as darkness fell, they walked to Black Ormiston’s lodging in Blackfriars Wynd to discuss the final details of the plot with him, and stayed there for over two hours. Ormiston’s uncle, Robert “Hob” Ormiston, 12 was also present; until now, he had known nothing of the plan to kill Darnley, but he made no bones about offering his services. After this meeting, from about 8.30 until 10 p.m., Bothwell strolled up and down the Canongate while his henchmen moved the gunpowder to Kirk o’Field, then he joined the Queen and her courtiers there at around 10.15 p.m.
    Hepburn told another tale, claiming that Bothwell had stayed at Moretta’s banquet until around 7.45 p.m. At around 8 p.m., he called briefly at his mother’s house, with Paris, then went on to visit Ormiston. Half an hour later, he left; Hepburn did not know where he had gone, but it was probably to join the Queen at Kirk o’Field.
    Ormiston claimed that, as the Queen was riding to Kirk o’Field after the banquet, Bothwell met him and his uncle in the Cowgate in order to check out the route by which the gunpowder was to be transported. After Bothwell had gone, Ormiston went down to the Blackfriars gate, negotiated his way through some ruinous houses, emerged on the other side and opened the gate. Paris, however, states that he and Bothwell went with the Ormistons to the Cowgate, where they met up with Hay and Hepburn. They discussed what was to be done, then Bothwell and Paris went to join the Queen at Kirk o’Field.
    The problem with all these stories is that, from about 4 p.m. until Mary returned to Holyrood around midnight, Bothwell was in attendance on her, both at Moretta’s banquet and at Kirk o’Field, and conspicuously dressed in masquing costume. He could not, therefore, have been meeting with his fellow conspirators at Holyrood early in the evening, nor could he have visited Ormiston’s lodgings, and it is very unlikely that, bent on murder, he made himself so visible by walking in his rich attire up and down the Canongate. Hepburn and Hay may well have met at Holyrood and at Ormiston’s house, and were probably coerced by their interrogators into claiming that Bothwell had also been present in order to incriminate him further.
    In the evening, William Powrie warned a friend, William Geddes, not to be seen on the streets of Edinburgh that night, a rash comment that would later be used to condemn him. Then, between 8.30 and 10 p.m., 13 acting on Hepburn’s orders, he, Dalgleish and Patrick Wilson, the merchant who had abetted Bothwell in his trysts with Bessie Crawford, transported the barrel and the gunpowder, which was wrapped in leather bags called polks that were packed in the two trunks, openly through the streets from Holyrood to the gate of the Blackfriars monastery, which was about 200 yards from Kirk o’Field. Powrie first claimed that this task was completed in one journey with two horses belonging to Bothwell, but later changed his story and said that they had undertaken two journeys with one horse belonging to the Earl’s page, Hermon. This